The German conquistadors

The presence of Nikolaus Federmann among the conquistadors in Colombia is a reminder that, while the overwhelming majority of them were Spanish, the picture is more complicated than is often thought. The typical party of conquistadors was comprised largely of poor Spanish men from Andalusia, Castile and Extremadura, men who had made their way to Seville and thence to San Lúcar de Barrameda, where the Guadalquivir flows into the Atlantic, and where most journeys to South America began. But they included a notinsignificant smattering of foreigners: Dutch, Fleming, German, Italian, Albanian, English, Scots and so on. And among these, certainly for a period in the 1530s, the Germans were far and away the most prominent. That’s because in 1528 the emperor Charles V owed the Welser banking family of Augsburg 143,000 florins.…